To Ariel Bloch, My Arabist Friend

Almost forty years after it happened

in the winter of 1947,

I saw a snapshot of my lost brother,

a Hellenistic Jew, sitting in a lifeboat,

wordless, a few yards from the shoreline of Palestine,

behind him a rusty sinking freighter,

his two years in a displaced persons' camp,

his two years in Treblinka.

With him in the boat, half a dozen Jews,

tired to death and hopeful, my brother

sat in the middle, somehow a little apart,

in a good overcoat, his gloved hands

in his pockets, thumbs out, his tilted fedora

brim up, a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket

as our mother taught him-still the boulevardier,

the flaneur. Knee deep in the water

to meet the boat and help them in, Mr. Kraus

from Frankfurt, to give the newcomers his card,

directing them to his Viennese pastry shop,

the best in Palestine.

And that other photograph of three or four

SS men, laughing, cutting off the sidelocks

of a wordless Jew wearing his prayer shawl,

in a street of Vienna and the passersby

laughing, it wasn't routine at all;

they loved every minute of it.

All this is hearsay.

My brother washed more than one death

out of his handkerchief. For me as a child

his handkerchief was a white mouse

he set free in Europe's worst winter,

when it became inhuman to love.

Ariel, whose language am I speaking?